MEXICO CITY – Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission, or CNDH, slammed a Canadian report on the killing of U.S. journalist Brad Will during a demonstration in southern Mexico almost three years ago.

Mexico’s Attorney General’s Office, or PGR, last week presented a report it had commissioned from experts with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, saying it coincided with its findings that Will was shot at close-range on Oct. 27, 2006 and that the two bullets that killed him were fired by the same weapon.

At the time he was fatally shot, the only people alongside Will – who worked for a Web site run by alternative, non-profit media – were protesters with the grassroots Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca, or APPO, who were demanding the resignation of the authoritarian governor of that state, Ulises Ruiz.

APPO member Juan Manuel Martinez currently is in jail awaiting trail in connection with Will’s death, even though the slain journalist’s family, Amnesty International and the CNDH, among others, say the move to prosecute him is wildly inconsistent with the evidence.

The CNDH says its own investigation – which was based on a study of sound recordings and shows that the time that elapsed between when the bullet was fired and when it struck Will was 0.166 seconds – has demonstrated that the shooter had to have been at least 35 meters (115 feet) away from the journalist.

Video from Will’s camera and photographs snapped by other journalists also showed men subsequently identified as police officers and municipal officials firing guns in the direction of the APPO protesters at the time of the American’s death.

On Thursday, the Commission said the conclusions arrived at in the Canadian experts’ report “are not based on technical-scientific elements,” and amount to nothing more than an “opinion.”

The CNDH said the Canadian experts – two retired police officers and a forensics doctor – prepared the report in just 14 days and have acknowledged that they did not carry out any reconstruction of the events in question nor examine the clothing Will was wearing at the time of his death.

According to the rights body, the conclusions were based merely on “good photographs” and information provided to them by the PGR.

The Oaxaca conflict began in May 2006 when teachers walked off the job. Its transformation into a movement to oust Ruiz occurred on June 14 of that year, when police used force to break up a sit-in by strikers in the main square of Oaxaca city.

Ruiz was a polarizing figure even before the clash with the teachers, as many accused him of rigging the 2004 election that brought him to power in the impoverished, heavily Indian-populated state.

The uprising against the governor was crushed by thousands of federal police and troops in November 2006, but not before at least 20 people – mostly Ruiz opponents – had been killed and the protests had caused millions of dollars in lost tourism revenue for picturesque Oaxaca city. EFE